The encrypted email service used by US fugitive, Edward Snowden has abruptly shut down, amid a legal fight involving US government attempts to win access to user information.

“I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people, or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit,” Lavabit owner Ladar Levison wrote in a letter posted on the Texas-based company’s website.

Lavabit was founded in 2004 by Texas-based programmers, allegedly prompted by privacy concerns about Gmail, Google’s free, widely-used web-based email service, and their use of the content of users’ email to generate advertisements and marketing data.

Lavabit offered significant privacy protection for their users’ email, including asymmetric encryption. The strength of the cryptographic methods used was of a level that is difficult for even intelligence agencies to crack.

Notorious hacker and founder of Ghacks called the secure email service “probably the most secure, private email service right now”. In July 2013, Lavabit had about 350,000 users, it offered free and paid accounts with levels of storage ranging from 128 megabytes to 8 gigabytes :: Read the full article »»»»